Say what you like about the Provisional IRA, but it is an organisation that chooses its words carefully.

This is why it has so far refused to utter a sentence that could truly transform the fragile Northern Ireland peace process. For instance:"The war is over."

And that is why the revelation that senior IRA personnel were in Colombia exchanging bomb and rocket making technology with the narco-terrorists of Farc is infinitely more significant than the Provisionals' decision to withdraw their offer of a decommissioning scheme this week.

The dispatching of three senior IRA engineers to the Colombian jungles is not a case of unemployed Provos seeking out new opportunities abroad. That assertion is the journalism of Alice in Wonderland and fails to appreciate the intentions of the IRA leadership.

For the man who sent the trio to South America, himself a committed Marxist and friend of dictatorships around the world, has always been lukewarm about the peace strategy.

He has always believed that the republican movement must be ready at any time to strike if and when the solely political path fails to yield new achievements for Irish republicanism.

His blessing for the Colombian mission meant that their presence there was sanctioned at the very highest levels of the IRA's command.

According to a senior Irish detective who has spent 30 years in the anti-terrorist struggle, the IRA team was not just training Farc guerrillas in the black arts of under-car booby-trap bombs and so-called barrack buster mortars. They in turn were receiving new information on bomb and rocket development from their Colombian comrades.

Given the embarrassment caused by the unravelling of an IRA plot to import arms from Florida two years ago, this latest debacle will be a stunning blow to the Agreement.

It is hard to imagine how David Trimble, Ulster's erstwhile first minister, could persuade his party to re-enter coalition with the IRA's political allies, Sinn Fein, in the light of the Bogota arrests.

The Good Friday Agreement itself looks increasingly like that dead parrot in the celebrated Monty Python sketch. The British and/or Irish governments resemble Michael Palin as pet shop owner trying to convince the parrot's owner (in this case the Northern Ireland electorate rather than John Cleese) that the bird is still alive.

But no matter how hard John Reid, Bertie Ahern or even Tony Blair bangs the Agreement on the wall in a bid to rejuvenate the accord, the deal like Python's parrot looks lifeless.

It is a message that opinion formers and supporters of the peace process don't want to hear but the reality is that after this latest incident, the Agreement is as dead as the parrot.